tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-89751499522082146992018-03-05T23:44:59.124+00:00Horizons of CareA blog about a bookChrisGhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17260596364280169227noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8975149952208214699.post-11016498884811375922013-10-18T14:52:00.003+01:002013-10-18T14:52:39.419+01:00What is Care? From Phenomenology to FeminismIf we are to care for future generations, what exactly do we <i>mean </i>by care?<br /><br />Philosophically speaking, there are two main traditions of thought that tackle care. One is phenomenological, and more specifically Heideggerian. The other is feminist ethics, and its critique of Kantian traditions in ethics and liberal-democratic traditions in political philosophy. Historically speaking, the first centres on Heidegger's discussion in <i>Being and Time</i> of care as <i>Sorge</i>, the existential attitude which defines all human being as concerned with its future. Heidegger's concept appears to draw on Spinoza's notion of <i>conatus</i>, the endeavour of an entity to persist in its own being, and thereby reaches back to the Aristotelian concept of the formal cause, that which it is to be a given entity.<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://chelspoeticallyspeaking.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/circles-of-care1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Circles of Care" border="0" height="302" src="http://chelspoeticallyspeaking.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/circles-of-care1.jpg" title="Circles of Care" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Circles of Care, from http://chelspoeticallyspeaking.wordpress.com</td></tr></tbody></table>This phenomenological tradition is linked with feminist thought via Nel Noddings' work, which cites Martin Buber alongside Heidegger (in whom she finds ackinowledgement that caring is ‘the ultimate reality of human life’ (Noddings 2005, 15) in developing a concept of care which is concern for the other, rather than for the self. Noddings views an attitude of ‘engrossment’ as basic to human being. Prior to self-concern, and particularly to a Heideggerian concern for one's own death, the essence of caring is represented as an intuitive, pre-conscious mode of disclosing through which the other appears to the self in the position of a vulnerable subject in need of care. Others are not detached and experienced in the form of objects, but as having specific needs and vulnerabilities that stand forth against a background of its possible futures, its potentialities.&nbsp; This attitude, for Noddings, both makes possible any enduring emotional attachment to the other, as well as any subsequent response to his or her apprehended needs. But it also has moral significance.<br /><a name='more'></a><br />What is important about engrossment is that it does not simply place self and other into a kind of phenomenological relation that tells us what kind of being, at bottom, the other is for us. It also constitutes an ethical relation, as engrossment has a normative component: care is knowledge of the other that brings with it a certain responsibility for this other's vulnerabilities. This responsibility may last for a fixed period of time or may endure indefinitely.&nbsp; The close relationship between knowledge and ethics is this event of disclosure has been associated by others with a non-intentional, immediate form of experience which underlies the possibility of both ethical life and, more radically, being human as such (Bauman 1993, pp. 87–8). Noddings continues in this vein by stating, for example, that the core of caring is a ‘nonrational’ responsiveness to the other (Noddings, 1984, p. 61). ‘Non-rational’ implies both that no rational ground can be given for the self-investment involved in caring, and that there is no conceptual mediation in the intuition, no act of interpretation.&nbsp; In answer to the question ‘why do you care about X?’, there is ultimately no answer. One does or does not. One could point to concrete familial or other relationships as the proper arena of care, and then locate a reason to care in biology, social norms, specific instances of personal affection and so on, but in Noddings’ account it is engrossment that is the existential basis of such relationships as humanly meaningful ones, and not vice versa. However, if no answer can be expected to being questioned as to why one cares about X, then the obvious next question to be ventured is ‘why then should <i>I</i> care about X?’<br /><br />To answer this question, one has to explore the links between Noddings' concept of care and a parallel tradition of 20th century ethical thought with links to the neo-Kantian tradition exemplified by phenomenology. Three important thinkers within this tradition are Emmanuel Levinas, Simone Weil, and Knud Ejler Løgstrup.<br /><br />Levinas, like Noddings, makes the relation to another moral subject existentially prior to our self-relation, our self-directed <i>conatus</i>. For Levinas, face-to-face encounters with other human beings, whether intimates or strangers, are also impersonal encounters with the Other as a phenomenological horizon of our experience, as the Other for whom we exist as an actual moral subject who can either harm or aid them. The gaze of the other, her face regarding us, contains the transcendental condition of our experience of ourselves as human, and embodies an infinite existential demand which calls on us to ensure that no harm is done to the (impersonal) Other, and to be ready to account for what we do and have done to this other. Levinas thus posits a primordial ethical experience as the condition under which humans experience themselves as human, a fundamental non-reciprocal responsibility to recognise the Other’s vulnerability through our words, thoughts and deeds (Levinas 1980, 200).&nbsp; <br />Simone Weil too finds the condition of ethical relationship not in the self, but in a demand the source of which lies in the other, while being at the same time impersonal: <br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him. It is this above all that is sacred in every human being. (Weil, 1962, p. 315)&nbsp;</blockquote><br />Similarly, the Danish philosopher Knud Ejler Løgstrup describes a fundamental demand imposed on us by the existence of others, one that creates the conditions of our own life, and without which it could not be genuinely human: ‘[o]ur life is so constituted that it cannot be lived except as one person lays him or herself open to another person and puts her or himself into that person’s hands either by showing or claiming trust’ (Løgstrup, 1997, p. 18); a demand exists because of the ’very fact that a person belongs to the world in which the other person has his or her life, and therefore holds something of that person’s life in his or her hands’ (p. 22). <br /><br />It is true that Noddings stands in sharp distinction to Levinas and Weil (and to a lesser extent to Løgstrup), insofar as she emphasizes the two-sided, transactional nature of caring (with the role of the cared-for a necessary counterpart to that of the carer). Moreover, her concept of engrossment emphasizes the constitutive role of the responsibility to respond to the other with attention and attuned sensitivity, rather than the challenge of being called to give account for oneself. Nonetheless, her concept of caring bears a fundamental similarity to these three accounts of the ethical demand. For both Løgstrup and Levinas, encounters with others lay bare an impersonal demand from which our responsibilities to real individuals flow.&nbsp; It is the compulsion to respond to this demand that grants ethical meaning to our actions, just as, Noddings notes, it is the&nbsp; ‘caring that gives meaning to the caretaking’ (Noddings, 1984, p. 22). For all three of these thinkers, it is the inescapable, constitutive responsibility to the other that infuses acts with meaning, not the acts or the ends for which they are performed (meeting needs, etc.).<br /><br />The unique powerlessness of future generations before the power of those alive now is a <a href="http://horizonsofcare.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/future-people-and-circumstances-of.html">well-established theme</a> in discussions of intergenerational ethics. It might seem, then, that the emphasis on vulnerability that drives Noddings' approach might be the ideal starting point for an enquiry into future-oriented care. Yet there are significant problems here, ones which also affect the phenomenology-linked tradition that includes Weil, Levinas and Løgstrup. This tradition reflects a historically-specific experience of ethical life, at the same time as it aims to uncover a universal ground of moral experience. Speaking through it is a desire for re-connection. It opposes to the rational foundations with which the Enlightenment sought to supplant the authority of religious revelation a non-rational foundation, a new revelation of the vulnerable other whose impersonal humanity, alongside their particularity, was denied in, for example, the Holocaust and the Gulag.&nbsp;&nbsp; <br />From this perspective, modernity has enforced, under the cover of its discourses of universality, a new social contract of mutual indifference (Geras 1999). While the rights of the other are publicly affirmed as a rational basis for morality and enshrined in law, they remain insufficient to safeguard the sacredness of the other against the seflish projections of the ego or the abstract, centralized plans of the modern State. Levinas’ response to this culture of indifference, in particular, is to search for an ethical foundation that can enforce a leap across the chasm from the individual to the Other. The violence of the self (and the State) that threatens to subordinate all being to its projects is to be overmatched by the violence of the Other that calls the self to heed the injunction not to kill: the imperialistic force of the hungry self is opposed to the attention solicited by the needy Other witnessed in the Judaic tradition, as Levinas reads it, opposed both to public law and the contingencies of private caring. As Gillian Rose puts it, the force of possession exerted by the ego is to be opposed by another originary force, the compulsion from the face of the Other ‘to decreate the self’ (Rose, 1993, p. 217). This does away with rationality entirely, and makes responsibility arbitrary and infinite.<br /><br />Transposing the idea of a responsibility to the other based on her vulnerability to our actions into the relation between present and future people creates more problems. Ulrich Beck (2005, p. 285), has argued that any adequate ethical response to <a href="http://horizonsofcare.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/technology-uncertainty-and-human.html">the uncertainties and ignorance</a> that shroud from us <a href="http://horizonsofcare.blogspot.co.uk/search?updated-min=2013-01-01T00:00:00Z&amp;updated-max=2014-01-01T00:00:00Z&amp;max-results=1">the future consequences of our actions</a> should treat the future as absolutely Other to the present. Yet to do this is, as Timothy Bewes (1997) has pointed out, to paralyze ourselves, to 'decreate' (in Rose's words) the present in order to preserve the future from unintended outcomes of action. Even if we can imagine ourselves into some kind of immediate relationship to as-yet non-existent future people, what kind of moral agency could this lead to, except one that restricts itself from acting at all (indulging in an inaction that could itself pose risks to future people)?<br /><br />The problem with the line of thought pursued by Levinas, Weil and (perhaps to a lesser extent)&nbsp; Løgstrup is that it seeks to draw responsibility out of an immediate experience, a non-rational ground. Noddings too relies on the concept of such an experience to distinguish her theory of care from other theories in normative ethics. Yet she also offers an escape route from paralysis. Not only does she make concern for futurity (embodied in the potentialities of the other) the essence of a caring disposition, the theory of care she presents is not, ultimately, dependent on the kind of punctual, existential encounter on which Levinas et al depend. Instead, Noddings makes transactional experiences of care - which have a narrative structure - the core of her descriptions of what it means to actively care for another.<br /><br />In the next post, we will examine other feminist thinkers' accounts of care, linking them to these two aspects of Noddings' theory, in order to understand care as disposition, as practice, and as a way of valuing.<br /><br /><i>References</i><br />Bauman, Zygmunt. 1993. <i>Postmodern Ethics</i>. Wiley<br />Beck, Ulrich. (2005). <i>Power in the global age</i>. Cambridge: Polity Press.<br />Geras, Norman. 1999. <i>The Contract of Mutual Indifference: Political Philosophy After the Holocaust</i>. Verso.<br />Levinas, E. 1980. <i>Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority</i>. Dordrecht: Springer<br />Løgstrup, Knud Ejler, 1997. <i>The Ethical Demand</i>. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.<br />Noddings, N. (2003). <i>Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics &amp; Moral Education</i>. Berkeley, University of California Press.<br />Noddings, Nel. 2005. <i>The Challenge To Care In Schools: An Alternative Approach To Education</i>. Teachers College Press.<br />Noddings, Nel, and Paul J. Shore. 1984. <i>Awakening the Inner Eye: Intuition in Education</i>. New York: Columbia University.<br />Rose, Gillian. 1993. “Angry Angels: Simone Weil and Emmanuel Levinas.” In <i>Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays</i>, 211–224. London: Blackwell.<br />Weil, Simone. 1962. “Human Personality (1943).” In <i>Selected Essays 1934-1943</i>, 313–39. Oxford: Oxford University Press ChrisGhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17260596364280169227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8975149952208214699.post-45390964185589952472013-10-11T15:04:00.000+01:002013-10-11T15:04:06.325+01:00Science, technology and ignoranceFollowing on from an<a href="http://horizonsofcare.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/technology-uncertainty-and-human.html" rel="nofollow"> earlier post</a>, I want to consider the relationship between technology and knowledge, and the illusions to which our thinking about it is subject. In <a href="http://www.johnkay.com/2013/09/25/technology%E2%80%99s-crystal-ball-offers-only-a-hazy-view-of-the-future" rel="nofollow">this piece</a>, John Kay provides examples of two such illusions in the space of four lines or so:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Knowledge is more than additive. <i>What we learn when we bring two bodies of knowledge together may be much more than the sum of each alone</i>. That is why the technological improvements that make it easier to gain access to that knowledge are so important. <i>We do not know what we will discover, only that there is a lot still to be discovered. </i>(emphasis added)</blockquote>&nbsp;Technological innovation, Kay assumes, necessarily adds to our knowledge about the world - but does not do so in a straightforwardly linear ('additive') way. Secondly, that 'there is a lot still to be discovered' about the world <i>qua</i> object of natural-scientific investigation. The first is not necessarily false, but it is only part of the story. The second, however, contains an actually false view of the relationship between science, technology and the world scientific research investigates.<br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cfcul.fc.ul.pt/coloquios/coloquiumunityofscienceinarabictradition/Lunar_eclipse_al-Biruni%5B1%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="225" src="http://cfcul.fc.ul.pt/coloquios/coloquiumunityofscienceinarabictradition/Lunar_eclipse_al-Biruni%5B1%5D.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Lunar Eclipse (from http://bit.ly/19F2o6r)</td></tr></tbody></table><br />The problem in both cases is Kay's refusal to acknowledge the relationship between science, technology and ignorance - which is, to be precise, that technological innovation (whether through the translation of scientific research, or more commonly, through tinkering and bricolage) creates ignorance as well as knowledge. Scientific research too can create ignorance, insofar as new discoveries reveal new aspects of nature about which we know nothing. But leaving this aside for a moment, the issue with technological innovation is that it is an engine of novelty. It adds things to the world that, as I noted in the post referred to above, tend to condition our lives and transform them in unexpected ways.<br /><br />If we focus on the significance of this for our knowledge of the consequences of innovation, however, then Kay's errors become clear. As <a href="http://www.hyle.org/journal/issues/7/schummer.htm" rel="nofollow">Joachim Schummer has pointed out</a>, the production of new technologies (and particularly the 'naturalised' kinds <a href="http://horizonsofcare.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/technology-uncertainty-and-human.html" rel="nofollow">I wrote of earlier</a>), by adding new entities to the world, extends our ignorance. How will these entities behave in relation to already existing entities (natural in origin or not). In this sense, it is not so much that so much of the dark continent of ignorance still remains to be explored, but that through our creativity we are adding to it all the time, even as we simultaneously domesticate more of it. The assumption of linear progress behind Kay's remark about discovery is therefore entirely incorrect.<br /><br />Certainly, innovation may enable us to add to our knowledge of the world. But the multiplier effect Kay casts in an optimistic light is not so unambiguous either. As Ian Hacking has pointed out,<sup>1</sup> the combination of different bodies of knowledge may achieve precisely the opposite effect to that Kay describes. A particular technological artefact may be dependent on two or more different bodies of scientific knowledge, as much in the case of Hacking's entirely unromantic example of baffles developed to prevent fly ash pollution from chimneys, as in synthetic chemistry, biotechnology or nanotechnology. Yet neither body of knowledge may be capable of providing any basis for predicting the behaviour 'in the wild' of the artefact in question. Nor may the two bodies of knowledge necessarily be unifiable through something like a set of 'bridging laws' that allow propositions from one to be translated into propositions from the other.<br /><br />In such cases, the existence of emergent 'interference effects' cannot be predicted - though, Hacking writes, it may be generally expected. While Kay writes in his article that the two technology commentators to whom he listened, one pessimistic and one optimistic about the prospects of technological innovation, both convinced him, his own viewpoint seems - epistemologically speaking, anyway - wildly optimistic. For the reasons laid out above, innovation makes it difficult to assess the consequences of what we do before we do it. But if we are less convinced than Kay seems to be that there is a fixed quantity of ignorance in the world, then we may decide we are not sure whether we want to find out what these consequences might be. And this creates <a href="http://www.academia.edu/3310984/What_Is_Responsible_about_Responsible_Innovation_Understanding_the_Ethical_Issues" rel="nofollow">ethical and political dilemmas</a>.<br /><br /><i>References</i><br /><sup>1</sup> Hacking, I. (1986). Culpable Ignorance of Interference Effects, in <i>Values at Risk</i>. D. MacLean. Totowa NJ, Rowman and Allanheld: 136-154. ChrisGhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17260596364280169227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8975149952208214699.post-14854725791148510212012-07-15T20:11:00.000+01:002012-07-15T20:11:03.834+01:00The Future Lives in Everything: Care, Conatus and 'The Road' [2]Much has been written about how the past is fading from the present of <i>The Road</i>. Just as nature seems incapable of sustaining life any more, so have the supports of individual identity in culture been lost, and even language itself seems to be under threat. <br /><blockquote>He dreamt of walking in a flowering wood where birds flew before them he and the child and the sky was aching blue but he was learning how to wake himself from just such siren worlds. Lying there in the dark with the uncanny taste of a peach from some phantom orchard fading in his mouth. He thought if he lived long enough the world at last would all be lost. Like the dying world the newly blind inhabit, all of it slowly fading from memory.</blockquote><blockquote>The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colours. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality.</blockquote>Without the webs of meaning that link objects and people together within a culture, the possibility of feeling what Martha Nussbaum has called the ‘upheaval of thought’, the disruption of identity consequent on loss of attachment and grief, is undermined.<sup>14</sup> The symbolic dimension of the past is as prey to entropy as is the natural complexity produced by billions of years of evolution. For this reason, the stories that the father tells his son as a way of weaving a last thread of cultural continuity are, as he recognizes, hazardous at the same time as being necessary: becoming involved with the past, either through invoked memories or simply through imagination risks awakening dynamics of mourning or melancholy (in Freud’s sense) or mere fantasy.<br /><a name='more'></a> <br /><blockquote>When your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be and you are happy again then you will have given up. Do you understand?</blockquote>Nonetheless, emotional attachment, love, and the meaning it contributes to human life remains at the core of <i>The Road</i>. This meaning is evoked through a sensitivity to futurity that McCarthy discovers on the far side of the event that appears to have destroyed history.<br /><br />This sensitivity extends to evocations of the futurity of things, the sense in which everyday objects serve as anchors around which the thickness of quotidian futures is woven. Objects which offer themselves for use, contemplation, and so on reinforce the sense of being able to trust the world which, according to attachment psychologists, develops out of the ‘safe space’ created by ‘good enough’ caregivers during childhood.<sup>15</sup> They reinforce our expectations that the future into which we are moving is one in which we shall remain at home.<br /><br />Although the decay of even the remnants of civilisation is destroying this possibility, the father in <i>The Road</i> remains sensitive to the connection between meaning and futurity. At one point, he recalls an occasion years after the cataclysm when <br /><blockquote>he'd stood in the charred ruins of a library where blackened books lay in pools of water. Shelves tipped over. Some rage at the lies arranged in their thousands row on row. He picked up one of the books and thumbed through the heavy bloated pages. He'd not have thought the value of the smallest thing predicated on a world to come. It surprised him. That the space which these things occupied was itself an expectation.</blockquote>Here, the expectation of future continuity is felt as encoded in the material being of the books, the shelves on which they stood and the rooms that contain them. Embodied in the products of purposive human action is care for the future, for continuation. Surrounded by such objects, and the forms of life they sustain – my computer on which I’m writing this, a coffee mug, the prints on the walls of my office and my own shelves of books – this sense of continuity inevitably holds a tinge of conservatism. Embodied in things as they are is an expectation that things should continue as they are.<br /><br />But in the world McCarthy’s novel describes, care for the future is shorn of any conservatism, and, perhaps paradoxically, the consequences is that its significance for human life stands forth more sharply as a result. Without the future nothing means anything – we cannot escape the fact that ‘the value of the smallest thing’ is indeed ‘predicated on a world to come’ – and without acts and objects that embody a future there is no future. Just as the salitter drying from the world represents the loss of the ‘hesitation’ between past and future that characterises, in Jonas’ philosophy, all living beings, the threat to the human present is a threat to care for the vulnerable, singular futures of what we care about and to the specific things and activities on which they depend.<br /><br />Attachments, and the webs of activities and objects which sustain them, hold open the future. The singular future of things and people we care about requires from us active caring, and impels us to extend our agency towards them and their needs, rather than to curtail it upon encountering the boundaries between people which liberal political philosophy has always suggested define our individuality.<sup>15</sup> From the mechanic’s and woodcraft skills displayed by the father to the tender bathing and caretaking of his son when he falls ill, care in the novel is a force which both wedges open a gap between present and future and grants shape, as a sculptor or woodcarver does, to the future which arrives through it. In its diverse forms it bears ritual significance that extends beyond the immediate benefit it brings: <br /><blockquote>The boy sat tottering. The man watched him that he not topple into the flames. He kicked holes in the sand for the boy's hips and shoulders where he would sleep and he sat holding him while he tousled his hair before the fire to dry it. All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you've nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.</blockquote>Continually we are reminded of how the day-to-day survival of the pair reaches beyond survival, through the inescapable symbolic dimension of care, its creation of new meaning and potential even as it concerns itself with simply sustaining what exists. Although even ‘the names of things one believed to be true’ risk dissolution, the care of the father for his son, and of the son for his father, holds open a gap through which novelty can creep or explode. The creation of absurd card games, swimming in an icy pool, firing a flare pistol – all bear witness to this excess of the present which is futurity. Without uncertainty, there is only death; but uncertainty untamed also threatens death. Creativity transforms uncertainty into security, love and even delight. This capacity for bringing unlooked-for novelty into the world was described by Hannah Arendt as characteristic of the human condition, a capacity she called ‘natality’, embodied by the birth of children, works of art and political action.<sup>17</sup><br /><br />The father’s care for his son does not therefore promise a grand story of redemption, only the everyday care of a father for his child who, his father eventually realises, he cannot kill as he promised he would should he himself die, in order to spare him from a worse fate in the post-cataclysm world. Everyday care is, however, arguably more important for sustaining a concrete sense of integrity, futurity and tangible hope than affirmations of lofty moral ideals, as Tzvetan Todorov has argued in relation to the stories of inmates of Nazi and Soviet concentration and labour camps.<sup>18</sup> The narratives the pair create between them – of their journey to the warmer South where there might even be, suggests the boy, other children – are sustained by this tangible yet precarious tissue of care – as fragile yet tenacious as the morels they discover – which is itself threatened by the father’s own fear-driven, violent responses to possible or real external threats as much as it is by these threats themselves.<br /><br />At many points, the son asks his father for reassurance that they are the ‘good guys’, wanting to be told that they are different from those who, they know, steal from and even kill others for food. We are not cannibals, he is told. In the most horrific sentences of the book, it is apparent that others, who have resorted to cannibalism, treat women as incubators for babies who will be used for meat once they are born. The ‘bad guys’, then, are marked out as people for whom, in Graulund’s words, there is nothing beyond ‘the immediate present’, for whom there is nothing which cannot be instrumentalized, degraded into mere matter to be used for survival. Even their own children, the embodiment of Arendt’s ‘natality’, the power of new potential, of unforeseen beginnings, of an open future, are sucked into the maw of the desire to survive at all costs. These ‘others’ embody and extend the entropy that has engulfed the world.<br /><br />This degree-zero degradation they embody, and which so disgusts the father and terrifies his son, is a denial of the responsibility that, according to Jonas, is the moral demand which accompanies the human experience of futurity – the need to care, not only for objects of attachment and those objects and activities which sustain them, but for care itself, for the potential of building, creating purpose even in the face of entropy. Jonas writes, with reference to the technological societies we inhabit today, that it behoves us to ensure that ‘never must the existence or the essence of man as a whole be made a stake in the hazards of action’.<sup>19</sup> It is this essence, as well as the existence, of humanity that is threatened in <i>The Road</i>, as is revealed by the prospect of accepting the need to eat one’s own children in order simply to continue to exist.<br /><br />It is in this sense that the boy is the ‘word of god’, as the father says, and is himself a promise, a ‘tabernacle’ (a container for the divine presence), is ‘carrying the fire’. The continuity build by the deeds and words of the father is both paternal and maternal, intended to teach his son both independence and the need to look after the vulnerability of the cared-for. The boy incarnates a promise that what Jonas calls the ‘essence’ of humanity, its natality, its capacity for creative responses to uncertainty upon which trust, love and flourishing depend, will be sustained. McCarthy has, in the past, been described as a nihilist, for whom the difference between good and evil ceases to have stable meaning. In The Road, however, it is evident that nihilism characterises only the ‘bad guys’, for whom the possibility of care, of creation, of resistance to the cold clasp of entropy has ceased to have significance. Those who preserve the ‘breath of God’, the fragile remnants of Boehme’s salitter, are those who hold open the future and charge it with potential, with possibility, incarnated in those for whom they care and the practices with which they care for them.<br /><br />As Mark Fisher notes, there seems to be no possibility of society left in <i>The Road</i>, and perhaps as he states, a suspicion of collectivity (or even a blindness towards it – why do the father and the boy’s mother not seek out and cooperate with their neighbours in the face of the cataclysm?<sup>20</sup>) is evident. Yet the basis of society remains, in the resources of care that appear to be embodied by the boy and by the family group who find him after his father’s death. The role of ideas and images of redemption in the book has been much discussed by commentators. Yet there is no great promise of redemption evident in the finale of the book, no obvious prospect that human society can necessarily arise anew from the ashes or that the results of such a future would be good. Everything remains uncertain. At the same time, the boy stands for an ‘unimaginable future’, one which exceeds the limits of the present entirely, and one in which there is no grief, no mourning and no melancholy for the past world which has been lost. The one secure anchor for the finale is a moral one. The thought experiment at the heart of McCarthy’s novel distils from it a moral distinction whose truth withstands even the almost total entropification of nature and meaning begun by the invisible cataclysm.<br /><br />We cannot finish on this note, however. The power of the ending of the book, beyond the events of the final few pages, resides in the ambivalence of its plangent final paragraph. <br /><blockquote>Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.</blockquote>The loss of an object of attachment is the loss of something irreplaceable, something <i>sui generis</i>. Here, McCarthy evokes, in its full concreteness and uniqueness, the singularity of the vanished world as something whose intrinsic value lies in its value as a limit. Some environmental ethicists insist that the meaning of nature is its independence, its resistance to our attempts to fully understand it and manipulate it. The maps of the becoming of the world are also mazes, unimaginable concatenations of ramifying contingencies that exceed all human comprehension. Within the limit staked out by nature, the narratives of human identity and agency find their proper matrix and armature. If a human world should become possible again far beyond the limits of the present described in the book – a world without grief, without mourning and without melancholy – would the lack of need to grieve for the loss of the old world in its specificity, and the mysterious stories woven therein, be something worthy of regret? Here, even the moral bedrock reached by McCarthy’s Jonasian exploration of the experience of futurity is haunted by loss, by a constitutive trauma through which its starkness is revealed.<sup>21</sup><br /><br /><i>Notes</i><br /><sup>14</sup> Martha Nussbaum, <i>Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions</i> (Cambridge University Press, 2003).<br /><sup>15</sup> Inge Bretherton, “The Origins of Attachment Theory: John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth,” <i>Developmental Psychology</i> 28, no. 5 (1992): 759–775.<br /><sup>16</sup> C. Gilligan, <i>In a Different Voice</i> (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 38.<br /><sup>17</sup> Hannah Arendt, <i>The Human Condition</i> (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998).<br /><sup>18</sup> Tzvetan Todorov, <i>Facing The Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps</i> (Holt, 1997). <br /><sup>19</sup> Hans Jonas, <i>The Imperative of Responsibility : in Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age</i> (Chicago ; London: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 128.<br /><sup>20</sup> Fisher, <i>op. cit</i>.<br /><sup>21</sup> Cf. Rambo, <i>op. cit.</i>ChrisGhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17260596364280169227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8975149952208214699.post-54731008194118231642012-07-15T18:23:00.000+01:002012-07-15T21:02:36.221+01:00The Future Lives in Everything: Care, Conatus and 'The Road' [1]<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/The-road.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/The-road.jpg" width="192" /></a></div>What place does the future have in human experience? A certain tradition, of which contemporary Western societies are the heirs, has long viewed it as a territory to be mapped, controlled, conquered. To this way of thinking, the future is most easily imagined as a linear axis along which the trajectories of economic variables, of social change, of and so on unfold. The future of planning, projection and forecasting feeds into our experience of the world around us. Yet this future co-exists with others, rooted in more intimate dimensions of experience. To uncover these dimensions and the kinds of future-orientation to which they give rise, it is necessary to reach down beneath the assumptions and habits of minds on which the planned, forecasted future rests and which mark it out as a more or less domesticated zone populated by our short- and long-term goals. To do this, a thought experiment is called for. And luckily, we have an example of such an experiment to hand. <br /><br /><a name='more'></a>Cormac McCarthy’s 2007 novel <i>The Road</i> can be read, I suggest, as exactly such an investigation of the existential significance of futurity. The novel has already been subject to a great deal of interpretation, which has found within it Emersonian transcendentalism,<sup>1</sup> post-9/11 reflections on the American experience of trauma,<sup>2</sup> and environmentalism.<sup>3</sup> Across most of these interpretations, the idea that there is, in McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic world, ‘no future’, precisely in the sense of a mappable, colonisable territory across which individual biographies and human history will continue to unfold, is often encountered. On the contrary, the future has vanished along with the past, and there is only the present left. <br /><blockquote>Temporally speaking, there is thus no real possibility to move either forwards or backwards, no chance for a return to the past nor any real hope for the future; all that is left is the immediate present, the next piece of bread, the next shelter, the next violent encounter that they have, somehow, to survive.<sup>4</sup></blockquote>The world depicted in The Road is one in which the perfect disaster of Ulrich Beck’s imagination has finally occurred. It is one in which Beck’s oft-repeated claim that the novel hazards of modernity, which cross boundaries invisibly and spread globally (typified by radioactive fallout and persistent, bioaccumulating pollutants), are ‘democratic’ by nature, capable of affecting those who are responsible for creating them as much as distant, innocent victims, is proven to be true.<sup>5</sup> The entire biosphere has been reduced to ash by unimaginable firestorms, triggered by some natural or human-caused disaster, we do not know which or what. The book deliberately avoids, however, the themes and narrative structures that characterize ‘environmental disaster’ novels, which often depict disaster as the sum total of small decisions and failures to ‘read the signs’. Such narratives dwell on causation – or at least correlation between a variety of self-destructive human activities and disaster – with disaster as the finale.<sup>6</sup> John Brunner’s <i>The Sheep Look Up</i> (1972) is particularly good example, in which a tragic narrative driven Beck’s rampaging transboundary hazards, propagated by human folly, lead to the destruction of North America in firestorms. <br /><blockquote>“We ought to call the brigade” she exclaimed. “Is it a hayrick?”<br />“The brigade would have a long way to go,” the doctor told her curtly. “It’s from America. The wind’s blowing that way.”</blockquote>In McCarthy’s book, however, there is no attempt at this kind of narrative, which typically relies on current scientific projections of possible futures in order to deliver warnings to the present. There is no explanation, simply the piecemeal elaboration (through flashbacks) of the immediate and longer-term aftermath of an event that seems to have created an almost implausible conflagration. In the ten or so years since the event, the human race has dwindled, through starvation, illness (exposure to the ash which blankets everything is hazardous) and cannibalism, down to a scattering of individuals and groups who wander the landscape in search of leavings from a vanished civilisation. The book concentrates on the wanderings of a man and his young son, aged around ten, born at around the time of the disaster.<br /><br />&nbsp;McCarthy takes pains to describe for us a world which Mark Fisher has suggested takes on the characteristics of the Gnostic conception of the material world, degraded and abject, a ‘burned-out husk that approaches [...] total entropy and inertia.’<sup>7</sup> The theme of entropy is undoubtedly a central driving force behind McCarthy’s depiction of the ‘post-event’ times. <br /><blockquote>The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.</blockquote>The ‘counterspectacle’ here is the opposite of the ‘becoming’ of which the trouts’ markings described in the book’s final paragraph are maps. Rather than evolutionary processes, which imply bifurcation, complexification and organisation, we are confronted by a global reversion to zero. However, Fisher is incorrect, I think, to describe McCarthy’s vision of the world as Gnostic. Gnosticism enforces a metaphysical dualism of substances, divine sparks and clods of matter, whereas McCarthy gives hints of a different, more neoplatonic metaphysics at work. Immediately after the passage I just quoted, he adds to the entropic drumbeat of the foregoing lines the mysterious (and much discussed) closing sentence ‘The salitter drying from the earth’.<br /><br />&nbsp;This term salitter originates with <i>Aurora</i> [<i>Die Morgenröte im Aufgang</i>] by the 16th-17th German neoplatonic philosopher Jakob Böhme, an author from whom McCarthy also takes the epigraph that opens his earlier novel <i>Blood Meridian</i>. It refers to a matrix of generative and creative natural forces which is ‘the common denominator of what is conscious and alive and of what appears inanimate and inert’,<sup>8</sup> and which also achieves highest expression in human consciousness. This principle is, in neoplatonic fashion, immanent in the world, as opposed to being entirely separate from it. Further, it may, in McCarthy's book, be ‘drying’ from the world, but it is not entirely extinguished. That this is so is apparent from the moment when the protagonists find mushrooms, or more specifically morels, beneath a dead rhododendron in an incinerated wood.<sup>9</sup> Morels, as well as being a prized edible fungus, are a saphrophytic species, one which helps to decompose dead organic matter and fertilise the soil. If the ‘counterspectacle’ of entropy threatens to choke off all of the becoming and unfolding of nature, then it is evident that there are still ‘good places’, as the boy puts it, where the salitter, in which the creative potential of nature is embodied, have not entirely evaporated.<br /><br />&nbsp;The idea of a generative tendency, immanent to living (and, in the case of Boehme and other later philosophers who belong to the same intellectual tradition, such as Franz von Baader and F. W. J. Schelling, non-living) entities has been associated with anti-mechanistic, vitalist tendencies within the philosophy of biology. Vitalism tends to be thought of as a dualistic metaphysics, however, in which a ‘life-principle’ is added to inert matter. If it is to be genuinely immanent in matter (as the Boehmean tradition suggests it must be), this principle must arise from the organisation or structure of matter itself. This stricture characterises the concept of a generative tendency employed by the 20th century German philosopher Hans Jonas.<br /><br />The key characteristic of living systems, for Jonas, is that their behaviour cannot be explained without purposiveness, without a governing principle of self-preservation and development (conatus). All living creatures are characterised both by internal complexity and, going from plants to animals, an increasing degree of independence from their environment. Independence, however, is bound up with dependence, which means that the condition of living creatures is what Jonas calls ‘needful freedom’.<sup>10</sup> The more independent a creature is (animals possess central nervous system and are mobile, whereas plants do and are not), the more numerous the uncertainties to which it is subject. Purposiveness comes with the boundary between organism and environment which characterises unicellular creatures: this boundary and the conditions internal to the organism that help sustain it must be sustained for the creature to survive.<br /><br />With purposiveness comes potential for change and therefore uncertainty. The condition of living beings, as described by Jonas, is one in which the future remains, to some extent, open. What has happened does not fully determine what will happen.<sup>11</sup> The degree to which the future is open increases with the complexity of the organism. Human beings are, for Jonas, different from other living creatures in the sense that they are able to reflect on and thus place themselves at a distance from their past and possible futures in deciding what to do next, and can thus select among a range of different purposes.&nbsp;&nbsp;In contrast to the entropic landscape McCarthy describes, then, the morels remain as bearers of the salitter, the purposiveness, in which natural processes are integrated in the maintenance of what Jonas calls ‘needful freedom’. As living entities, they hold open a minimal crack in the future which increasing entropy appears to be inexorably closing down. What of the boy and his father, and the significance (if any) of their wanderings? I want to suggest that the concept of life described by Jonas can help us understand the significance of a number of elements of their experiences as well, and indeed the moral framework which McCarthy develops in the novel.<br /><br />&nbsp;In the post-disaster world, in which entropy appears to be winning, human purpose appears to have been extinguished. Without organised societies, there can be no more history, no recording of actions. Yet at the same time, the father insists on the reality of a moral order, even without any societal institutions, and to which his son, like his conscience, insists he be true. How can such an order have meaning in a world where, as the old man Ely they encounter insists, there is no god, either in the sense of a truly transcendent being who grants purpose to creation through his will or in the incarnate sense used by Christ” ‘where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them’.<sup>12</sup> The father insists, however, in response to Eli that there is god, a ‘warrant’ (the word he uses early in the book when thinking of his son) for his view of the world and the sense of who he is which comes with it. What can this mean?<br /><br />Jonas suggests that there is a ‘warrant’ for morality even in the absence of god, in the shape of the purposiveness of natural beings, the salitter that remains.<sup>13</sup> Without going into too much detail, this warrant allows for a distinction between the ‘bad guys’ and the ‘good guys’ in the world of The Road which maps the moral categories to which the son (in particular) strives to be true. Importantly, it does not provide a maximalist, teleological version of goodness. Instead, it allows for a minimal distinction between good and evil based solely on the experience of futurity left to those who inhabit McCarthy’s world.<br /><br />In the next post, I will explore what this distinction might mean.<br /><br /><i>Notes</i><br /><sup>1</sup> Schaub, Thomas H., “Secular Scripture and Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’,” <i>Renascence</i> 61, no. 3 (2009): 153–167.<br /><sup>2</sup> Rambo, Shelly, “Beyond Redemption? Reading Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’ After the End of the World,” <i>Studies in the Literary Imagination</i> 41, no. 2 (2008): 99–119.<br /><sup>3</sup> Monbiot, George, “Civilisation Ends with a Shutdown of Human Concern. Are We There Already?,” <i>The Guardian</i>, October 30, 2007<br /><sup>4</sup> Rune Graulund, “Fulcrums and Borderlands. A Desert Reading of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road,” <i>Orbis Litterarum</i> 65, no. 1 (2010): 57–78.<br /><sup>5</sup> Ulrich Beck, <i>Risk Society : Towards a New Modernity, Theory, Culture and Society</i> (London: Sage Publications, 1992).<br /><sup>6</sup> George Monbiot’s reading of the book as an environmental warning ignores this signal difference between The Road and books within this genre – see Monbiot, <i>op. cit</i>.<br /><sup>7</sup> Mark Fisher (2010) ‘The lonely road’, <i>Film Quarterly</i>, 63(3), pp. 14–17<br /><sup>8</sup> Lawrence M. Principe and Andrew Weeks, (1989) ‘Jacob Boehme's Divine Substance Salitter: its Nature, Origin, and Relationship to Seventeenth Century Scientific Theories’,<i> British Journal of the History of Science</i>, 22, pp.53-61.<br /><sup>9</sup> I owe this observation to Dr Paul Nieuwenhuis.<br /><sup>10</sup> Hans Jonas, <i>The Phenomenon of Life </i>(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1982).<br /><sup>11</sup> Chris Groves, “The Futures of Causality: Hans Jonas and Gilles Deleuze,” in <i>Causality and Motivation</i>, ed. Roberto Poli (Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, 2010), 151–70.<br /><sup>12</sup> Matthew 18:20 (KJV)<br /><sup>13</sup> For a fuller account, see Vogel, Lawrence, “‘The Outcry of Mute Things’: Hans Jonas’s Imperative of Responsibility,” in <i>Minding Nature: The Philosophers of Ecology</i> (New York: Guilford Press, 1996), 167–185.ChrisGhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17260596364280169227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8975149952208214699.post-70841673988832473192012-05-19T22:41:00.000+01:002012-05-19T22:56:26.679+01:00On "risk thinking": risk as rationalization<div class="MsoNormal">To understand the relationship between technology, finitude and uncertainty, we need to appreciate how far the futures our use of technology creates are increasingly viewed through the lens of risk. The use of risk as a frame for representing the future to ourselves has become central to a wide range of areas of public life, including government and regulation, business, and health care. This has been largely a post-World War II phenomenon, becoming particularly evident during the decades since the 1970s, alongside the transition within industrialised societies from a consensual, essentially Keynesian socio-economic settlement (the age of centralised technocracies and welfarism, including the French <i>régime général</i>, the German <i>Soziale Marktwirtschaft</i>, the British Welfare State and later Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society”) towards more fragmented, neo-liberal and initially monetarist social forms.<br /><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-c3D-8lcL1Ck/T7gNWk3AvEI/AAAAAAAAACs/Of6Dohh0Z7I/s1600/800px-Risk_Management_Effectiveness.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="210" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-c3D-8lcL1Ck/T7gNWk3AvEI/AAAAAAAAACs/Of6Dohh0Z7I/s320/800px-Risk_Management_Effectiveness.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Risk Thinking</td></tr></tbody></table>What Nikolas Rose has referred to as "risk thinking" is a loose collection of social practices and habits of mind which centre on the idea that social action can best be legitimated through the evaluation of probably consequences of actions. A substantial body of scholarship rooted in Science and Technology Studies has documented how a probabilistic and purportedly systematic view of potential future outcomes of action, drawing essentially on methods of failure management within engineering, became part of a wider social movement towards quantitative measurement and assessment of the outcomes of policy during the 1970s (Wynne 1992; Wynne 1996), drawing on a variety of developments in neo-classical economics, game theory, public choice theory and so on in a “search for new forms of legitimate order and authority” in a new neoliberal age (Wynne 1996, p. 78).<br /><br /><a name='more'></a>Calculating and managing risks offers a way of taming what, in this historical period, appears as an increasingly worrying tendency for even the most supposedly disciplined forms of social action to produce harmful unintended consequences. Most importantly, it promises to do so in ways which do not merely&nbsp;<i>symbolically</i> separate the orderly from the disorderly, irrational from rational,&nbsp;pure from the impure. Risk thinking&nbsp;should therefore be seen as an extension of well-established trends towards “rationalization” that are often (particularly by sociologists working in the Weberian tradition) taken to be synonymous with and as definitive of modernity (Turner 1993). Rationalization through risk thinking promises control, made possible by translating unknowns, through research and investigation, into known, quantifiable factors that can be entered into a theoretical model.&nbsp; <br /><br />Rationalization is generally associated with centralization – whether in industry, as in Fordism and Taylorism, or in government, as in the model of modernisation which drove the emergence of social insurance models across advanced industrial nations during the 20th century. Yet it is possible to see the increase in decentralization associated with neoliberalism as accompanied by an <i>increase</i> in rationalization. In fact, rather than decentralisation, neoliberalism means <i>re-</i>centralisation, associated with multiple centres of calculation.&nbsp;From this perspective, the breakdown of the post-war socio-economic consensus in the USA and Europe increased the need for societies to become “legible” and standardized to those (such as civil servants in government, but also increasingly including arms-length regulatory institutions and private businesses enrolled in increasingly privatised public services such as energy and water utilities) tasked with shaping and executing public policy (Moran 2007).&nbsp;<br /><br />With the emergence of neo-liberal states and their reliance on a wide variety of social actors, public and private, in extending and realising the executive power of government, the need for statistical inputs into policy increases, rather than decreasing. Everything from energy demand and food production levels, to educational attainment and healthcare outcomes becomes the subject of measurement, proportionate to the degree to which administrative responsibilities were re-distributed. The more distant from central government the actors who sustain the executive power of the state are, the more they are subjected to audit (Power 1997). Risk thinking extends this drive for measurement into the future, seeking to make it as legible and standardised as the spatial territory over which governance extends here in the present.<br /><br />The promise of better management based on probability and the quantification of benefits and harms offers the prospect of erasing the distinction between what Tannert, Elvers et al (2007) call objective and subjective uncertainty. Facing a future populated by events which we may be unable to predict (objective uncertainty), we may be unable to decide which values or norms should guide us (subjective uncertainty). However, systematic risk analysis holds out the hope that, through careful research, the distribution of potential negative or positive outcomes can be characterized well-enough to provide us with firm guidance.&nbsp;As a manifestation of deeper processes of rationalization, risk thinking may be interpreted as an extension of the&nbsp;<i>disenchantment</i>that Max Weber saw as characteristic of modernity.&nbsp; <br /><br />The disenchantment of the world is founded on the growing authority of scientific knowledge in the modern age, which Weber and his champions assume gradually replaces religious consciousness and, more generally, symbolic modes of understanding reality. Freud, for instance, represents this development as growing societal momentum towards “disillusionment”. Religions, and moralities based on them, promote the symbolic effects of action, effects that scientific thinking criticises as necessarily illusory. By contrast, science enables us to understand the <i>real </i>effects of action by systematizing data about the world with which our particular bodily senses and cognitive capabilities provide us (Freud 1962). It replaces the connotative forms of thinking which characterise religion with denotative, positivist thought, where what is represented is the thing itself and its quantifiable, measurable properties. <br /><br />But is this true of risk thinking? In the next post, I want to suggest that the demarcations it sets out to establish are no less symbolic and connotative than the categories employed by religious thought, and that they are inappropriate to deal with the kinds of uncertainty that accompany wide reliance on naturalised technologies. Rationalization, in this sense, retains something of a mythological core; probability and prophecy are perhaps not as easy to distinguish as risk thinking hopes. <br /><br /><br /><i>References</i><br /><br />Freud, S. 1962. <i>The future of an illusion</i>. London: Institute of Psychoanalysis. <br /><br />Moran, M. 2007. <i>The British Regulatory State: High Modernism and Hyper-Innovation</i>. Oxford: Oxford University Press.<br /><br />Power, M. 1997. <i>The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification</i>. Oxford: Oxford University Press. <br /> <br />Tannert, C. et al. 2007. The ethics of uncertainty: In the light of possible dangers, research becomes a moral duty. <i>EMBO reports</i> 8(10), pp. 892–896. <br /><br />Turner, B. S. 1993. <i>Max Weber: from history to modernity</i>. London: Routledge. <br /><br />Wynne, B. 1992. Uncertainty and Environmental Learning - Reconceiving Science and Policy in the Preventive Paradigm. <i>Global Environmental Change-Human and Policy Dimensions </i>2(2), pp. 111-127. <br /><br />Wynne, B. 1996. May the sheep safely graze? A reflexive view of the expert-lay knowledge divide. In: Lash, S. et al. eds. <i>Risk, environment and modernity: towards a new ecology</i>.&nbsp; London: Sage, pp. 44-83.</div>ChrisGhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17260596364280169227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8975149952208214699.post-91314521753668176632012-03-23T11:09:00.001+00:002012-03-23T11:10:54.126+00:00Technology, uncertainty and the human condition<link href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5Cssocg1%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml" rel="File-List"></link><link href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5Cssocg1%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_themedata.thmx" rel="themeData"></link><link href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5Cssocg1%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_colorschememapping.xml" rel="colorSchemeMapping"></link><style><!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"Cambria Math"; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-1610611985 1107304683 0 0 159 0;} @font-face {font-family:Calibri; panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:swiss; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-1610611985 1073750139 0 0 159 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin-top:0cm; margin-right:0cm; margin-bottom:10.0pt; margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;} .MsoPapDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; margin-bottom:10.0pt; line-height:115%;} @page WordSection1 {size:612.0pt 792.0pt; margin:72.0pt 72.0pt 72.0pt 72.0pt; mso-header-margin:36.0pt; mso-footer-margin:36.0pt; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} --></style> <br /><div class="MsoNormal">In the previous post, I noted that, when we reflect on the nature of our relationship to future generations, it becomes apparent that we need to be careful not to view the unfamiliar too readily through the lens of the familiar. Employing familiar concepts analogically or metaphorically to map an unfamiliar territory may, of course, be helpful in some circumstances. But sometimes tension between the content of the metaphor and important features of the target domain is simply too obvious. This, I’ve suggested, is evident when we employ concepts of justice and parental care to get a handle on what is ethically significant about future generations.</div><div class="MsoNormal">What is missing, in both instances, is an appropriate understanding of how our actions, here and now, produce the future our successors will inhabit, and the limitations on how far we can understand the connection between what we do and how the future turns out. In other words, this is the problem of uncertainty. As I mentioned in the previous post, the link between present and future people is not direct. Between us stand the products of our efforts to transform the social and extra-social worlds. However we imagine our relationship to our successors, it requires us to also imagine the means by which this will be actualised: technologies to provide renewable energy, a sustainable welfare state, new medical techniques, more democratic forms of governance, more inclusive educational systems, and so on. Nonetheless, our grasp of what the consequences of our efforts are likely to be is clouded by uncertainty. </div><a name='more'></a><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/Hannah_Arendt.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/Hannah_Arendt.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hannah Arendt</td></tr></tbody></table><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">In recent decades, some sociologists (e.g. Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens) have suggested that an appreciation of this uncertainty, in the shape of a concern with “risk”, marks a new epoch in human history. An understanding that the future is uncertain is, and an abiding concern with uncertainty, “with the precarious and perilous character of existence”, is hardly novel, however: indeed, it has the credentials for being considered a universal aspect of the human condition.<sup>1</sup>Hannah Arendt described the human condition as being the inescapable root of our finitude – yet at the same time, as not being the same as a fixed “human nature”, defined by e.g. particular biological and cognitive capacities or psychological traits (like “self-interest”). Instead, she suggests that our capacity for transforming the world, for innovation, is also the source of our finitude. Whatever we create through <i>subjective </i>effort becomes an <i>objective </i>condition of our lives and the lives of others. Marx pointed out, human beings make history, but not under conditions they themselves have created; Arendt adds that even those conditions they do create will escape, as time goes on, their control, and change the <i>form</i> of their lives in unanticipated ways.</div><br /><div class="MsoNormal">The uncertainty of the future is, therefore, a basic element of what it is to be human. Not primarily because we are vulnerable, like other living creatures, to contingencies within the natural environment we inhabit (though this is also true – the fox in the rabbit’s future becomes the drought in the Sumerian farmer’s). It is more because there is a mismatch between our efforts to condition the world in which we live and how we end up being conditioned by their products. Technology provides one of the best examples of this effect, one of which <span style="font-family: inherit;">Ulrich B</span>eck, in particular, makes much. Advanced technologies, specifically, can amplify this mismatch between conditioning and being conditioned. </div><div class="MsoNormal">We might define an advanced technology as one which is either internally highly complex (integrated circuits, nuclear power stations) and/or one which is capable of unleashing processes which enter “intimately” into other ones, either natural or technological (e.g. industrial chemistry, nuclear power stations, biotechnology). This latter characteristic is particularly important, because it amplifies the spatial and temporal reach of the effects produced by technologies “[w]hereas at the time of ploughs we could only scratch the surface of the soil, we can now begin to fold ourselves into the molecular machinery of soil bacteria”<sup>3</sup> In both these senses, we can represent advanced technologies as <i>naturalised</i>, to use a term employed by the philosopher Alfred Nordmann.<sup>4</sup> Internally complex technologies are hard for their users to understand (how my PC translates keypresses into these words is a process beyond my ability to describe). How technologies which unleash “intimate” causal processes create their effects may also often be difficult to understand (even for scientists who understand how the technologies themselves work in a lab situation). In either case, the internal workings of the technology in question, or its interactions with the wider world, are “black-boxed”. As a result, it takes on a somewhat uncanny, quasi-natural aspect: endocrine-disrupting synthetic chemicals (found in organisms from the equator to the Poles), greenhouse gases, genetically-modified plants all appear to possess a kind of autonomy. Similarly, the workings of computers, power stations and other complex devices are hard to imagine without attributing a kind of semi-wild agency to them, which can be unpredictable and hard to contain.</div><div class="MsoNormal">What does this mean for our central theme? Advanced technologies intensify the “human condition”: they increase the gap between our efforts to condition the world, to transform it into a form which is dependent on our intentions, and the ways in which the products of our efforts condition us, and create a world in which we do not recognise our intentions. To understand our relationship with future people, then (and our responsibilities to them), it is essential we start with the ways in which our efforts to transform the world mediate between us and them – and this brings requires that we investigate the themes of uncertainty and finitude that Arendt and Nordmann’s analyses open up.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i>References</i>&nbsp;</div><div class="MsoNormal"><link href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5Cssocg1%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml" rel="File-List"></link><link href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5Cssocg1%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_themedata.thmx" rel="themeData"></link><link href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5Cssocg1%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_colorschememapping.xml" rel="colorSchemeMapping"></link><style><!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"Cambria Math"; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-1610611985 1107304683 0 0 159 0;} @font-face {font-family:Calibri; panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:swiss; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-1610611985 1073750139 0 0 159 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin-top:0cm; margin-right:0cm; margin-bottom:10.0pt; margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;} a:link, span.MsoHyperlink {mso-style-priority:99; color:blue; mso-themecolor:hyperlink; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed {mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; color:purple; mso-themecolor:followedhyperlink; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;} .MsoPapDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; margin-bottom:10.0pt; line-height:115%;} @page WordSection1 {size:612.0pt 792.0pt; margin:72.0pt 72.0pt 72.0pt 72.0pt; mso-header-margin:36.0pt; mso-footer-margin:36.0pt; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} --></style> </div><div class="MsoNormal"><sup>1</sup>Jackson, M. 1989. <i>Paths toward a clearing: Radical empiricism and ethnographic inquiry</i>. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. pp. 15-17.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><sup>2</sup> Arendt, H. 1998. The human condition. Chicago: Chicago University Press.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><sup>3</sup> Bruno Latour, 2008 "« It’s development, stupid ! » or How to Modernize Modernization?", <i>EspacesTemps.net</i>,&nbsp; 29 may, <a href="http://espacestemps.net/document5303.html">http://espacestemps.net/document5303.html</a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><sup>4</sup> Nordmann, A. 2005. Noumenal technology: reflections on the incredible tininess of Nano <i>Techne</i> 8(3), pp. 3-23.</div>ChrisGhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17260596364280169227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8975149952208214699.post-76193863186676599212012-03-08T21:46:00.004+00:002012-03-08T21:51:26.361+00:00Thinking about Care<div class="MsoNormal">In the last post, I introduced some issues arising from the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">unfamiliarity </i>of intergenerational ethics. &nbsp;We are used to thinking about the ethical and political significance of relationships between contemporaries. But when we try to apply these concepts to the relationships between present and (as yet) non-existent future people, we run into difficulties. Rawls points out that Hume’s circumstances of justice, for example, do not hold, and that therefore the idea of justice itself is somewhat problematic. Rawls tries to rescue the idea of intergenerational obligations, however – and unsuccessfully – but that’s a topic for another post. Here, I want to introduce an alternative way of thinking about intergenerational relationships, one which does not foreground justice, but privileges <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">care</i> instead<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">.&nbsp;</i></div><a name='more'></a><br />Thinking about intergenerational relationships in this way emphasizes different aspects of being human to those that are placed in the foreground when we focus on issues of justice. There are, however, difficulties with this kind of approach too. A care-based approach may also interpret the “unfamiliar” (intergenerational relationships) rather too hastily in terms of the familiar. The need for scepticism about our concepts, and to clear carefully the ground where we choose to stand, is no less pressing here than it is when considering the limitations of concepts of justice.<br /><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The use of particular metaphors to flesh out what is meant by a stance of care is one way where the ”overfamiliarity” of such an approach may become clear.<a href="http://www.uea.ac.uk/phi/People/Academic/Rupert+Read"> Rupert Read</a> has promoted a care-based approach to thinking about intergenerational ethics. He has also produced, for the<a href="http://www.greenhousethinktank.org/page.php?pageid=home"> Green House</a> thinktank,<a href="http://www.greenhousethinktank.org/files/greenhouse/home/Guardians_inside_final.pdf"> thoughtful and cogentarguments for a “third house” of Parliament</a> [PDF], tasked with representing the interests of future generations (a proposal about which I hope to write in due course). Whilst being sympathetic to Read’s arguments, I think some of his work shows how readily concrete and appealing metaphors may easily become overextended in attempting to deal with the unfamiliar.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In his paper <a href="http://eastanglia.academia.edu/RupertRead/Papers/130847/Justice_or_love">Justice or Love?</a>, Read argues that impartial justice is an inappropriate concept for us to use in working through problems of intergenerational ethics, because it is wrong to think that it captures the moral significance of the relationships between present and future people. Others have made similar arguments, such as Robert E Goodin and Hans Jonas (whom Read quotes). The relationship between present and future people is not like that between contemporaries, considered as, say, "mutually indifferent" citizens of more or less liberal-democratic polities. Rather, Read suggests, it is more like the relationship between parents and children - indeed, the comparison is closer than th<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">is: "</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">The analogy is so direct, it is barely even worth calling an analogy: future generations <i>are</i> our children".&nbsp;</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">I think that the idea of care (carefully conceived) can have a useful and even powerful critical role in, as Read puts it, "loosen[ing] the grip of the picture that has a hold of us" in thinking about future people (this "picture" could be justice, or something else, like unending technological progress - whatever, the point is that our familiar habits of mind tempt us to misrecognize the nature of our relationship to posterity). The analogy between present-future relationships and parental ones underlines the <i>vulnerability </i>of future people to our actions - even the basic conditions under which they will live depend on what we do. But to state that future generations "are our children" is a rhetorical flourish that goes beyond the limits of what the concept will bear.&nbsp;</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">What is unique about care as a stance towards future generations - and this I shall return to in future posts, as it is a central theme of my book - is how it is <i>mediated</i> in ways which parental relationships are not. It is, of necessity, mediated by objects which are valued (in different ways - some as means to external purposes, some as constitutively meaningful and/or as embodying purposes in themselves). These objects might be cultural and/or social in nature, or they might be part of non-human nature itself. In fact, nature might be seen as the primary mediating "term" between present and future people. Whatever, I would suggest that it is these objects which give us the material through which care is expressed, and indeed, made meaningful at all. It is true that care for children may be made concrete and meaningful through these kinds of objects - we might wish our children to grow up in an unspoiled landscape, appreciate music, and so on - but the difference is that our relationships with future people are <i>essentially </i>and <i>necessarily </i>mediated by them.&nbsp;</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And further, some of these objects - such as technological artefacts like nuclear power stations or particular social institutions, like hedge funds - might, in standing between us and posterity, even undermine our efforts to care. While I think Read is, therefore, entirely correct to place care in the foreground, I believe how we understand what it means to care for the future needs to take a different approach and to draw on a wider range of conceptual resources.&nbsp; </span></span></span></div>ChrisGhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17260596364280169227noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8975149952208214699.post-70633667545841772242012-02-27T21:13:00.001+00:002012-02-27T21:15:26.255+00:00Future people and the circumstances of justice<div class="MsoNormal">What is the nature of our relationship to future generations? Since the 1960s, when what has become known as “intergenerational justice” became a topic of interest moral philosophers, this question has produced a lot of perplexity. Future people are nameless, faceless, purely potential people. When we consider the actual people with whom we share the planet, then we find they stand to us in a variety of personal&nbsp; - friends, lovers, children, employers - and impersonal – fellow citizens, contractees, bearers of rights – relationships. With our contemporaries, we have relationships which may be taken to impose upon us duties of various kinds – the duty of care of a parent, the duty not to harm another’s interests or deprive them of their property and so on – which we either fulfil or not. Depending on how we bear ourselves towards these others, our relationship with them may change – possibly quite radically.<br /><a name='more'></a><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">What is our relationship with future people? When we speak of “descendants”, it is implicit in this term that we mean specific people who, one day, will be able to look back at us as their ancestors. In other words, the personal relationship we bear to them does not yet exist. We might speak of “posterity” instead. But this impersonal term (a noun derived from the Latin <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">posterus </i>which simply means “coming after’) is impersonal in a radical sense – it simply refers to the totality of the generations that succeed us, however many there may be. It has a purely temporal reference, rather than implying (unlike impersonal concepts like that of legal person or contractee) any set of social practices carrying moral implications.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9c/03-rawls-225.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9c/03-rawls-225.jpg" width="222" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">John Rawls (Wikipedia)</span></td></tr></tbody></table>If we have obligations to future generations, then they must depend on the nature of our relationship with them, just as our obligations to other adults with whom we share the earth now, to children, and to non-humans differ according to the nature of our relationships with them. To understand the nature of this relationship, we can move in one of two ways. Given that we (meaning those who live in industrialised and industrialising societies, increasingly dependent on advanced technologies in our daily lives) are either unused, or have become unused, to thinking about these kinds of issues, we can either start from scratch and try to entirely rethink our concepts of responsibility to fit this new situation, or we can move from some aspects of our familiar concepts of responsibility to think through the implications of our relationship with posterity.<o:p></o:p><br /><br />It's easy to suspect that assuming the situation is entirely novel in every way is likely to lead to paralysis rather than down any productive path. Most philosophers who have dealt with these issues have therefore sought to strike a balance between the need for conceptual novelty and the need to work with concepts which are already meaningful to us.&nbsp;<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Brian Barry, for example, has consistently argued that working from the familiar to the unfamiliar, making “adjustments along the way”</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">&nbsp; </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">(Barry 1997, pp. 43-4) is a more practical strategy, as well as providing conclusions that will be “stronger” for the “rather strange case of future generations” if they can be shown to be “plausible in more familiar cases” (Barry 1983, p. 18). The concept of justice itself, Barry suggests, is where we need to begin from, and more concretely, justice conceived of in terms of the sharing of opportunities (rather than, say, the distribution of utility). </span><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><br /></span><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Exactly what conceptual resources we begin with, however, is a question which demands some skepticism, and that we carefully clear some ground. For example, whether "justice" is appropriate (as opposed to, say, beneficence) as a way of thinking about the normative implications of our relationship with posterity is not entirely obvious. Is it an overextension of this concept to immediately use it to explicate how we need to think about future obligations? If it is, then it might be so because it already implies a concept of our relationship with posterity which is inaccurate. This point is already present in one of the seminal discussions of intergenerational obligations, that provided by John Rawls in his 1972&nbsp;</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">A Theory of Justice</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">.</span><br /><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><br /></span><br /><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Two hundred-odd years before, David Hume's <i>Enquiry&nbsp;</i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Concerning the Human Understanding </i>(1748), observed that the idea of justice could only logically be applied to situations with certain characteristics. Justice can only become a consideration when people find themselves in situations of limited objective scarcity, between “extreme abundance” and “extreme necessity” and limited subjective self-interest, between “perfect moderation and humanity” and “perfect rapaciousness and malice” (Sec. III, Pt. II). Rawls develops this definition by noting that it concerns a condition in which cooperation between people is necessary to serve the interests of all and in which individuals possess their own substantive conception of the good which they view as worthy of wider recognition. All humans in this situation are subject to deficits of knowledge with respect to their and others’ situation, cognitive biases etc. which may be culpable faults but may more likely simply be part of the existential constitution of human beings (1972, pp. 109-110). Above all, the circumstances of justice apply only between individuals who are able to help or hinder the interests of others.<br /><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">The key point here is that this criterion does not apply in the intergenerational context. The “threat advantage” possessed by present people with respect to future people is not opposed by any comparable capacity on the part of posterity. Posterity cannot harm our present interests in the same way that we can, through our power (whether intentionally or unintentionally exercised) over the living conditions of future people.</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><i>"</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">the question of justice does not arise” (Rawls, 1972, p. 254). How then, should we proceed to link the familiar concepts we use to think about obligations to the "unusual situation" in which we find ourselves when considering posterity?&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">&nbsp;</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><br /></span><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><b>References</b></span><br /><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Barry, B. 1983. “Intergenerational Justice in Energy Policy”, in MacLean, D. and Brown, P. G., eds, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Energy and the Future</i>, Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 15-30.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Barry, B. 1997. Sustainability and Intergenerational Justice. <i>Theoria</i> 45(89), pp. 43-63.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></div><div class="MsoQuote" style="margin-left: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Rawls, J. 1972. <i>A Theory of Justice</i>. Oxford Clarendon Press.<o:p></o:p></span></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><br /><br /></div>ChrisGhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17260596364280169227noreply@blogger.com1